By ALASTAIR MACAULAY
Audiences who came of age in the Iron Curtain era still find it astonishing to contemplate a career like Diana Vishneva’s. Ms. Vishneva is the prima ballerina of the Maryinsky (Kirov) Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia, and appears on its foreign tours, dancing not just its old ballets but also its newly acquired [...]

By ABBY ELLIN
COOKIES? On a diet? Apparently so.
Just ask Christina Kane, who has tried everything from the grapefruit diet to Atkins, with no success. Then she heard about Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, which involves eating six prepackaged cookies a day, plus one ‘real’ meal — say, skinless chicken and steamed vegetables.
“I thought, ‘That diet looks [...]

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

In recent years the playwright David Ives has become better known as a theatrical plastic surgeon. He’s the man primarily responsible for nipping and tucking the wayward books of the wheezier Broadway musicals for the City Center Encores! series. And this season he did his level best to spray away the smell of [...]

By PETER S. STEINFELS

Why can’t religion and the Enlightenment be friends? What’s that, you say? They were friends? Why didn’t anyone tell us?
Well, David Sorkin has. A professor of history and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin, he argues in a new study that religion and the Enlightenment were even more than friends.
“In the [...]

By HANNA ROSIN

I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often [...]